Charles The Monkey!

This is Charles the monkey, i created him on adobe illustrator whilst i wa soff for christmas during december. i was thinking about my animation, and felt like it was lacking a character, so i thought long and hard about possible characters, and came up with this guy. Hes almost like the protector of Jeramia the bear, everytime Jeramias sleep is interupted, Charlie appears and 'deals' with the problem! All his body parts are seperate pieces so all of him moves, except his facial expression, i gave him eye lids so he could blink but that is all. I also created props for Charlie which include a dagger, and a sharp stick, which he uses later on the animtion.

Star Wars Work Experience

During the last few weeks, me and my friend David Denny were asked to do a small ammount of animation for an illustration company, Keltie Cochrane. The animation basically consisted of animating different aspects of the new star wars book covers. For copyright reasons i unfortunatly cannot display any of the picturesm artwork, or titles of the book. We had to stick with the original artwork, and werent really allowed to change it, however we could add in certain effects and features of our own, aslong as it didnt change the original designs. if i am honest, i was somewhat disapointed with what we actually had to do, there wasnt a great deal they expected from us, and since we were limited to using the original artwork, there was only so much we could do, like move the star fighters across the scene, zooming in and out with the camera, panning through the landscape, and occasionally rotating the odd bits and pieces. This for me made the project a little bit boring, not that i wasnt grateful for the work experience, it was interesting, but i just feel that there was alot more we could of done to the work, and made it look ten times better, if we were allowed to adapt the artwork. All in all it was kind of an interesting project, getting to see the exclusive designs and the star wars books etc, but as far as what we had to do for the animation side, just wasnt enough for me.

Octopus Extravaganza (Stop Motion)

This is a stop motion video we created using dragon stop motion. The video basically consists of people coming out of a box, switching around a bit, then people getting consumed by an octopus. I thought the overall result of the video was good, however timing was a major issue in my eyes. Some parts of the video moved too quickly and you couldnt see everything, it could of perhaps been done a bit smoother as well.

Clarences Background!

This is a screen shot of my background for the animation, it isn't finished yet it still has tress a sun and a few more features to be added in yet, but this is what i have so far. All the waves are separate so they move separately more in the style of cut out animation.

Clarence In Motion!2

This is another screenshot of Clarence moving in this part he's moving his arms and claws as he walks.

Clarence In Motion!

This is a screen shot of clarence the crab moving in the animation, his eyes move along with the body as if he was moving so fast his eyes get dragged behind him. The arms move and the claws snap also, when i moved the arms i had to move them separately from the claws otherwise the animation wouldn't of worked correctly, i had to do the same thing with the eyes when i animated them, i had to move the eyes separately to to the individual eyes.

So many activities!

This is a screen shot of the beginning of my animation. 2 weeks ago was the first time i had ever used adobe after effects before. However last week i had started to finalize the animation for the crab 'Clarence'. I used him as the first character to start to try and animate on adobe after effects. And now he's pretty much complete, with a small walk cycle, blink sequences and arms and leg movement. I used the puppet tool to animate the character it was a lot simpler and quicker than i thought it would be, however i did hit a few snags when it came to saving and reopening the project.

Clarence The Crab!

This week i have focused mainly on getting used to adobe after effects, because i have never used it. However, before i did that i had to have a character to use in after effects, and i did have another 3 characters but i decided i wanted to change my crab design. So i changed my crab design first in illustrator, adding a mustache and giving him smaller legs and better looking eyes. I kept a similar colour composition. Once i had done this i got into after effects and began to animate it.

This is my finished model sheet for my character design, i changed the positioning of the writing and the fish to make more room for the actual bear poses. Because originally the bear poses were not the centre of attention so i had to make them bigger and make it more centred.

Mode Sheet Background

This is the current background i made for my model sheet. I created it on illustrator, all colour no outlines. I am not sure as of yet whether to keep this for my animation background or to change it but if i do there isnt that much i would change about it.

Kettle The Over Friendly Seal

This is my seal design for the animation, again in illustrator, i used the same technique for designing this character as i did for the rest. I am not 100% about this design as of yet i think i like it but i am going to get a second opinion first before i settle on Kettle.

George The Retarded Pelican

This is my Pelican design for my animation, its made again in illustrator using simple shapes and no outlines for the cut out animation effect. I am happy with this design so i wont be changeing it, this was the first design of this character.

Barry The Crab

This is my crab design for the animation, i did this again on illustrator using simple shapes with no outline and just colour. I havent finalised this design as of yet, this was the first design i did of it and it was straight onto illustrator so when i get some spare time i will have another tweak at it.

Jeramia Jizz Bear

This is my blue bear character design for my animation. I designed the first design on paper as rough sketches to get an initial idea of what i wanted the character to look like, however from there i went onto illustrator to make the character look more like cut out animation style and ended up with this result. Its all made from basic shapes with all colour and no out line.

	MONDAY	TUESDAY	WEDNESDAY	THURSDAY	FRIDAY
MORNING	Completely finish my script and rough versions of storyboards at least. If I have time do my net version aswell.	Finalise concept art, most of it is complete, but do the stages of were I changed the actual character.	Complete assets for animatic so I can make a start on the animatic by Thursday.	Tie up any loose ends from previous work in the week.	Tie up any loose ends from previous work in the week.
AFTERNOON	Make a start on finishing off the assets for the animatic and do the alpha channels. Also right on blog about progress during the day and upload pictures of progress.	Evaluate the days progress on my blog with uploaded images to show progress.	Evaluate the days progress on my blog with uploaded images to show progress.	Evaluate the days progress on my blog with uploaded images to show progress.	Evaluate the days progress on my blog with uploaded images to show progress.

Last week i developed my character design into a more cut out animation style. I created it all on illustrator, without any line work, just the colour. From there i developed them further to give it a range of different facial expressions and put it all onto model sheets. I then designed the basis of my background for the animation, but i think i may add some more things too it as i go along. Then i created the rest of the characters making each body part that i plan on moving individual. I had to find a suitable font for my model sheets, i went onto Da Font to find several before i chose one that i liked the best. I had some problems trying to design the dolphin, i couldn't get a character that i liked using illustrator, so i am thinking about changing the dolphin characters to clams or an octopus maybe.

This animation is called Stare into the sun by Ian Stevenson from the Pictoplasma book. Its in the style of cut out animation, and is about a little scarecrow looking man who has two pet balloons, he pops one of them, and the other floats out the window. As he chases it, he discovers a world that he has never seen before because he has never left his home.

This was another cut out animation i looked at from the Pictoplasma book. It was designed by Fantasia Utamaro for a band called the Black Ghosts. It features a skeleton like character walking along to the beat of the music with a hoover and sucking up all the different characters. The randomness of the characters and the general animation itself is why i like it.

The Black Ghosts - I Want Nothing from Southern Fried Records on Vimeo.

This is another cut out animation i looked at called 'My First Crush' by Julia Pott. The story is about actual people telling stories about the first person they fancied or fell in love with, and their stories are portrayed and shown through the animation of different animals. Its done frame by frame and a bit of cut out animation, I especially like the humour of the animation.

My First Crush from Picasso Pictures on Vimeo.

Mr Wobbles Nightmare

This is an animation i looked at called 'Mr Wobbles Nightmare' from the Pictoplasma book. Another animation that i loved, it was done using fruit as the characters bodies, and a live background, the only thing that was animated was the characters body parts which were all done in the style of cut out animation, possibly using adobe after effects. The animation is about a police officer ringing up a man named Mr Wobble, to inform him that his son Robert wobble, had been killed at an under ground party, a rave! "Some how they all got locked inside and couldnt get out until we arrived, they ran out of drinks, and had no food. The other party goers must have been desperate, they started eating him alive!"

'The Colouring' by Joseph Pelling

This is one of my favourite animations, it is called 'The colouring' by Joseph Pelling and features a little girl crying for a doctor as her friend is dying on the floor, a sinister squirrel appears from the tree and argues the point with her. It is all edited with a sound bite from the shining with the squirrel as Jack Nicholson and the little girl as Jack Nicholsons wife in the shining. Its done frame by frame, and every image was coloured with pencil individually. I mainly like the simplicity of the characters and creepiness of the animation itself.

The Colouring from joseph Pelling on Vimeo.

Melvin Morph Dance 3D

This is a video of my 3D character rigged as best as i could and rendered. i had major problems with the legs and foot roll at the last minute, and the time i had left wasn't enough time to sort the problem out, so to result i ended up having to use a different character to show the walk cycle, and used my character to show the morph tags and movement of arms and legs etc.

DAVES 3D CHARACTER (MY WALK CYCLE)

In the end i had to use Daves character to animate with and show a walk cycle because my original 3D character had problems with its legs to the point where the time i had left would of been pretty much impossible to complete a walk cycle with the character if i had to repair it as well. So this is my version of an attempted walk cycle using daves 3D character. I wish i had more time because its no were near as good as i would of liked it to be but its a walk cycle and shows movement of the body and arms etc so thats it.

Melvin Coloured Storyboards

This is my finished neat version of my storyboards for the 3D project, showing what i am hoping to achieve in my animation. Melvin notices wandering shellfish and runs over to them, he goes to pick one up and eats it, he then stamps on the other. And then flicks the other one vigorously!

melvins storyboards (rough) 3

This is the last shot of my rough storyboards. In this shot Melvin picks up a shellfish and throws it off the screen.

Melvins storyboards (rough) 2

This is the second page of my rough storyboards, in these to shots, melvin reaches down for one of the shellfish, then stamps on the other one and kills it. These violent mannerisms are to illustrate Melvins attitude and personality, which isn't very nice at all.

Melvins storyboards (rough)

This is a rough sketch of my storyboards for what i hope to achieve in the animation. In these two shots, melvin is creeping up on the shellfish at the beginning, then grabs one and puts it in his mouth.

Melvin Morph Tags

This is a screen shot of Melvin and some morph tags that i added to him. This is a simple enough process in my opinion. You just go to your characters mesh (cube) in the objects manager, then right click it, go to character tags, go down to morph tag, click that, then get the selection arrow, make sure the points tool is selected. Select all the points you want to morph, then move them into position. After you have done that go back to the attributes manager on the morph tag and click animate. Then there should be a bar which you can move to morph your characters face.

Melvins Background Rendered

This is a screen shot of the finished result of melvins background, with white sky, background and floors, and the appropriate lighting to give him visibility and shadows.

Melvin Lighting

This is a screenshot of Melvin when i was creating his all white background. It mainly consists of adding a sky, background and a floor, then adding a light to show the brightest side if the character and the shadows to go with it.

Melvin Rigged and Binded

This is a screen shot of melvin rigged, controllers coloured and binded. Binding was simple enough, however the weighting process was a little more complicated, i new how to do it, it was just trying to figure out which parts to weight and which parts to leave blank, because to begin with i was just weighting the whole character, and that didnt work at all.

Completed Colour Controls

This is basically just a screenshot of the finished result of the colour controls.

Melvin Colour Controls

This was one of the simplest parts of the rigging in my opinion. All it involves is colouring the controllers to make it more noticeable and easier to use. Red is for the left controls, Blue is for the right, and yellow is for the central controls. You do this by selecting the object and changing its colour in the attributes manager.

Melvin Shoulder RIG

This is a screen shot of Melvins shoulder rig, this was a slightly more complicated part of the rigging. Especially when you had to insert the clavicle joints, which had to be perfectly alligned or they wouldnt work properly. After that was set up, the rest of the process was just doing the IK set up and adding the pole vector, which is a similar set up as the leg rig.

Melvins Leg Rigged

This is a screen shot of my 3D character in the first stages of rigging. In this image i have rigged the leg. by going to character, joint set up, hold control and clock where you want the joints to go. Then i labeled the joints so i didn't get confused. Then right click your first joint, go to character tags, then go to IK. In the attribute manager, drag the ankle joint into the empty field, and add a goal and a pole.

This week i am going to be rigging my 3D character, starting with the legs, working my way up to the spine, then to the arms etc. The process is simple enough when you know the method. On Cinema 4D, make the character editable, go to character, then joint setup, hold control on the keyboard, and click the places on your characters body were you would like to place the joints.

Melvin 3D Coloured

This is a screen shot of my 3D character coloured. To do this we used body paint in cinema 4D. To do this we had to make the image editable, then go to the box icon in the top left hand corner and go to BP UV Edit, this allows you to get the colouring options up. Then from here you click on the paint brush icon with the stars around it, and this will make your character accessible for painting. Then simply go to colour, choose your colours, and colour in your character. This is just the first base tone of my character, i havnt yet began to put any tone or depth into it, but i will start that eventually.

Melvin Rendered 3d 2

This is the latest screen shot of Melvin, the symmetry has been added, and i have welded all the bits together, and made a few modifications to the ears and back to give it more depth.

Melvin 3D Ears

This is a screen shot of when i was creating Melvin's ears, this as relatively similar to making the hands. using the knife tool to select the three spaces you want to extrude, then rotating and resizing them to get them to the shape i eventually wanted. After this i started giving the body and head more depth by making the backs and fronts bigger.

Melvin 3D Nose Job

This is a zoomed in view of Melvin's face when i was creating the nose, it took a few tests to decide on the perfect size for his nose because i wanted it to hang below his mouth like on the original designs. But after fiddling around with it a bit i decided i liked it better a little higher than initially planned.

Melvin 3D Rendered

This is the best i've done with the 3D character so far, only half the image has been designed because we make it symmetrical afterwards which basically just copies that side to the other. I still have to texture and rig it but thats an upcoming process. once i got the hang of it the body, hands and head was quite simple, but the face itself was a bit tricky to get the hand of, but with a little help from a man they call the genius i mastered it eventually!

Melvin Flemiwink 3D 2 in Cinema 4D

This is yet another screen shot of Melvin in the process of being made into a 3D model, this still was a failure, the arms and legs where fine but the body had to be completely redone so it would animated properly.

Melvin Flemiwink 3D in Cinema 4D

This is a screen shot of Melvin being created as a 3D model on cinema 4D this was the first attempt at him, and wasn't good at all, this was when i was just getting used to the aspect of 3D and eventually had to start fresh because it looked that bad and i had that many problems with it. The character didn't look that bad, it just wouldn't of animated properly when it was rigged so starting it all over again was my only option.

This is the second page of my character sheets, showing the different facial expressions he may have. yet again textured and with the same background and use of colour, this one has a brief description of the character, where he lives, what he does etc.

This is one of the two character sheets i designed for my 3D character Melvin Flemiwink. He lives in a forest and eats plants, berries and shellfish, so i thought the foresty background i chose was appropriate for the character himself. I added a scale texture to his body, as he is a lizard like character. It shows a front, back and side view of the character, and in the top left hand corner the colours used on his body.

E4 Bird And The Berries Animation!

This is the animation i eventually created for the E4 brief. This was one of my favourite projects out of the ones we have done, simply because we had total freedom in what we did, except for it couldn't be violent, rude, or have bad language in it for television presentation. but other than that the general theme, characters, etc was all up to us. Designing the bird was the first step, well after thinking of the idea to present the E4 logo. once i had concluded on a design for the bird, i had to draw him up. i decided to animate the bird in pose to pose first and then scan the individual drawings onto the computer and put them into the animation from there. However, I hit a bump in the road when trying to get the bird images onto the computer, my original plan was to scan them in but apparently that would of been much more time consuming and not as precise as using the dragon software and photographing them in. So thats what i did, then i live traced, and live painted all the 24 birds, and then they were ready to be put onto my animation. Before i uploaded the bird onto cinema 4D though, i had to create the assets for the background, which i done all in illustrator and wasn't difficult at all. From there the animation began, the bird was already done, it was just a matter of animating a few of the props like the berries, and the eggs. The eggs were another problem i came across, i had to animate 93 eggs individually which took me about 3 hours and was insanely boring! But once they had all been animated the end result looked quite funny in my opinion. There were also some glitches with the alpha channels of the eggs but i sorted the majority of them out in the time i had. To finish all i had to do was animate the baby E4 logos and add in the sound. the E4 logos were easy enough to do, that took me about half an hour to get them all up and running. Then there was the final part, the sound! This consisted of downloaded noises from the internet, which were just ridiculous and some of which had nothing to do with the character itself, but linked in a good way all the same. I initially wanted to record my own sounds, as i preferred this being a more original way of doing it. however there was a shortage of computers at the time and i had problems transferring the sounds from one computer to another so i had to use other sounds to save time. I was more than happy with the overall final animation, however with more time it could of been a lot better.

The Furious Crab!

This is a quick character design i made for no reason other than my own personal interest. I sketched it all out first, then scanned it into photoshop. From there i live traced and then painted the design to make it look how it does now

Bird Character Design

This is another character design of a bird, this one is probably the most relevant out of the collection that i found, simply because this bird looks the most like my character, due to the shape of the beak and the eyes.

This is an image of a character design of a bird, this is relative to my work because i my self have designed a bird as my main character so i will be able to use this as reference, and if i need to make any sudden changes this could come in handy for that purpose aswell.

Last week for the E4 project, i started on my assets and aimed to get the majority of them if not all of them done by the end of the week. i managed to complete all my background and foreground assets, bushes, trees, plants etc. From there i began on creating my character using traditional frame by frame animation. I got all the poses done, then i did a line test on the animation software Dragon, and it all flowed perfectly. However once it came round to live tracing the images and colouring them in, it became a lot more difficult due to several minor faults, like lighting, and resolution etc, which i will hopefully resolve this week if i want to keep to my schedule.

This is my time plan for the E4 project, if i can keep on target this is hopefully what i want to stick to, so that i get my animation completed on time.

Rainbow Snail

Crazy ass little doodle!

E4 Stinger, Monsters Throws Up

E4 Stinger, Bird Likes Pop

e4 Sting Finalist - Bird Likes Pop from Pete Walklett on Vimeo.

E4 Stinger, Bird Looks In Hole

E4 Stinger, Bird Lays Egg

E4 Stinger, Zelda Cat

Melvin Flemiwink Screenshot 2

These are the actual designs of Melvin Flemiwink Illustrator, however these do not include the linework.

Melvin Flemiwink Screenshot 1

This is a screenshot of my character Melvin Flemiwink, which i designed, then traced and coloured in Illustrator. This was the colour i decided on after pondering on a few different options.

Queezy theTurd!

This is another quick sketch of one of my random characters, Queezy the Turd. i sketched it out first then scanned it into Illustrator and coloured it in.

Second Ever Animation!

This is the finished animation of Billy, Kevin the 3 deadly chipmunks and the magical xylophone. All the characters and backgrounds created on Illustrator, then i produced the animated scenes on Cinema 4D then from there i rendered it to Final Cut and edited the sound on there. Hope you Enjoy!

Random Character Sketch

This was just a random drawing i did during a 15 minute break, the glorious Owl Monkey and Octopus interacting!

Basic Character Design (The Shocked Frog)

This is just a basic character design. In the mini project we were given a sheet, with a description of something that we didn't know, and we had to draw the character to what we thought it was. It turned out mine was a frog. Afterwards i scanned it into Adobe Photoshop and coloured it in. This was the quick finished result.

Second Ever Animation Storyboards (2)

In this set of storyboards Kevin seises his opportunity to steal the xylophone from Billy whilst he is distracted by the butterfly. Billy suddenly realises its gone and starts to chase him. He catches up to Kevin and head buts him in the air, and the xylophone then falls out of his mouth and bounces near the trees.

Second Ever Animation Storyboards (3)

This is the second page of storyboards for my animatic. In these scenes, the xylophone has been knocked out of Kevin's mouth, and bounces over near the trees. Billy then summons the 3 deadly chipmunks which come from the xylophone, and kill Kevin! Then Billy takes back his xylophone and walks of into the sunset.

Second Ever Animation Storyboards (1)

This is an image of the storyboards i developed for the animatic part of the animation. The characters were also originally hand drawn, then produced in Illustrator afterwards. In these scenes the basic story is there is a yak called Billy, who has a magical xylophone which plays music without being touched. However there is also a jealous zebra named Kevin who wants the xylophone for himself. He spots Billy and the xylophone and waits for the appropriate moment to steal it . Then lone behold, a butterfly appears and distracts Billy and Kevin seises his opportunity.

Second Ever Animation Background!

This was the background i created on Adobe Illustrator for my second animation. I originally drew it by hand, then drew it out on Illustrator afterwards.

In the project we were asked to create a 30 second animation, using the basis X, Y and Z. From there i created a short story about a yak, a zebra and a magical xylophone.